The Ghosts of Lake Yokai
by FloraOne
Summary: Usagi has been pining for Mamoru for years. Now, on a mission with him at this pretty lake with this pretty onsen and a princess to find, it's suddenly becoming worse than it's ever been. Canon-divergant fic set to the backdrop of Episode 40 of the classic anime, written for smutember 2019.
1. Chapter 1

_So this was actually a Week 3 trope, and it's also actually a fic I've wanted to write FOREVER (because it's kind of set in one of my favorite episodes, see below) but never did, and wasn't going to now either, except this somehow ended up feeling like a perfect bridge between Smutember and spooky-season. So, here you have it after all, on the last day of Smutember!_

_Anyway: Here's another episode in the 'Usagi and Mamoru canonically suck at communication' saga for you lol. This time, I placed my new aged-up What-If universe into a setting you all know, and hopefully remember. Remember episode 40? The one with Evil Endymion and the ghost/japanese mythical creature/lake monster at the ryokan Usagi and her family are staying at? I loved that episode, but it totally left me wanting, cause I felt it could have been … so much more. This here doesn't fill that episode's potential either, not at all (it needs like a hundred more attempts to get it right!) but I did give it a try!_

_The trope I used for it, primarily, was 'Sex On a Mission' but as you'll see there are others that fit it as well._

_Forever thanks to my beta Uglygreenjacket. Thank you for being so excited about this for me, love!_

* * *

The Ghosts of Lake Yokai

Written for Smutember 2019

* * *

Usagi was a nervous wreck, and this rather large and entirely too gorgeous ryokan room seemed suddenly tiny when Mamoru filled it out.

She was pretty sure that weird-ass lake outside their pretty, private terrace view was only feeling so weird because _she_ was feeling so weird, and this was all a big waste of awkward, unnecessarily and unbearably tense time.

At least unbearable for her. Mamoru seemed pretty unfazed, as always.

…And he smelled too good. She felt like a creep, but he _did_, and when he bent slightly right behind her, inky black hair shifting so prettily as he leant down to deposit his over-the-top sophisticated brown leather weekender bag on the crunchy, soft tatami mats beside hers, she could smell him even more.

Shampoo and soap and clean and roses and Mamoru. It was all so very unfair.

"Do you want the left or the right one?"

His voice startled her a little bit. Low and rumbly and a little quieter in the silence of their shared room, disturbed only by the gurgle of the pipes and water right outside that was the fancy private onsen in this fancy, _way too romantic_ room.

"Um…" she squeaked, and cursed herself immediately for the tone, "I don't really mind…"

Mamoru nodded curtly, and with a slight shift, he stepped onto the small platform in front of them, raised from the rest of the room that housed two separate futons very, very close together, and dropped his bag beside the one on the right.

She stood rooted there a little, watching his back flex as he shed his reddish-brown leather jacket, and then knelt ridiculously gracefully on the tatami mats beside his bag.

His zipper sounded loud and startled her out of her stare, and as he started to unpack – toiletries, pajamas, a book, his glasses – she swallowed hard and simply chucked her painfully pink and cutesy duffel bag and red backpack onto the left of the two futons and decided unpacking was for organized people. And for those who could keep a clear mind when faced with the fact that they would spend the night and maybe several nights on a futon directly next to another futon on which Chiba Mamoru would sleep.

All night. In the dark. Next to her. Breathing the same air and hearing the same gurgling pipes.

She swallowed hard and allowed her restless mind to focus on the room. Hopping from one food to the other, her socked feet sinking slightly into the tatami mats, she absentmindedly fingered the starched and soft yukata folded on the impeccably white sheets of her futon, an almost identical pair on the futon next to her. They were your run of the mill, simple ryokan kind, the likes you saw in different patterns in any ryokan around the country. This one was blue, almost turquoise, simple fabric with a black belt, a brown and black-hemmed haori jacket folded underneath.

Behind her, Mamoru had neatly deposited his pajamas underneath his pillow, and was walking with a stack of folded clothing to the open, wooden wardrobe in the tiny hallway portion of their room where he'd deposited the big bag filled with folded paper and ropes earlier. Slowly and carefully, Mamoru started putting ironed shirts on hangers.

He was one of _those_ people. One of those people who hung their clothes in hotel rooms instead of just living out of their bag. Of course, he was.

She repressed the urge to roll her eyes and instead walked around to check out their room. It _was_ incredibly fancy. Colorful, delicious looking wagashi next to a ceramic tea set on the little coffee table in the middle of the room, two low floor seats with intricate cushions facing each other, a low wooden sideboard against the room with a Balmuda water boiler. Further into a room, an area lowered into the floor, tatami mats making way for wooden floors, and in front of a giant floor to ceiling window, two impossibly soft looking couches facing each other, the kind you'd sink into and watch the rain outside on the pretty terrace and never wanted to get out of.

Off to the side, the bath.

Her feet thudded duller on the wooden floors as she stepped into the tiny front room. The toilet, she knew, was on the other side of the room in its own tiny cubicle. This one only held a wash basin, a giant mirror, white light and a wicker stool. She pulled the sliding door to her right and stood in what was both the shower and the way out into the terrace. One milky sliding door more and she stood outside.

It was impossibly beautiful.

Japan in autumn was heartbreakingly magical – especially when viewed from the side of a steaming hot spring.

Their private outdoor onsen was all black, matte slate tiles, steaming water, fern and tall bamboo lining the rims, and looking out over the lake over a low fence like a tiny, miniature, tranquil paradise, what with all that golden and red foliage and the slight breeze, and it would likely be absolutely unused.

Mamoru stepping out and stopping beside her made her heart thud widely, and she had to hold her breath a little as she studiously refused to look at him, and instead fixed her gaze onto the calm, picturesque lakeview.

"Um… so, do you want to go um…" Her voice was back to being squeaky. Damn heart. She cleared her throat and tried again. "… Should we grab a bite to eat?"

She chanced a look up then, but Mamoru wasn't looking at her. He had his eyes trained at the onsen with a steady glare, his hands buried deep in his pocket, and he stood close – so, so close – in the little space there was in front of the wide steps into the onsen.

His brow furrowed harder, even as he didn't look away from the tiles and the steam and the water and the fern, scolding it with his eyes, and his voice was somehow dark. "We should probably head out soon," he almost barked. "Rei said the ritual could take a couple days. We should start right away."

Right. Of course. After all, he wasn't actually here with her because he wanted to be.

She was here because she was lately always the one to be doing stuff like this. Because she, graduated and wholly directionless, always had the time and nothing actually important to do, unlike the others, and so she was always the one stuck with weird missions – but when everyone had cried prior obligations – including Mamoru – and it looked like she was actually heading out to a supposedly haunted lake all on her own, he suddenly insisted he come too, even when he previously had been one of the ones saying he didn't have the time.

Go figure. Even years in, Mamoru didn't trust her to do her job. Would this ever change?

So then Mamoru had booked a room for them, Usagi had sat at Hikawa a lot for a few nights being instructed by Rei to make Shide and Ofuda and cutting her fingers on paper a lot in the process, and they found themselves in a pretty room at a pretty lake grasping for straws and if maybe that weird energy around that lake had anything to do with maybe hiding legendary crystals and ancient royalty they were still looking for even years after first donning their magical suits.

She nodded stiffly, turned, and walked back through all white-tiled shower and back into their room. The small washroom now held his toothbrush and toothpaste in pedantically symmetrical distance to each other, she saw.

* * *

It took them hours.

The traditional Shinto ropes Usagi had weaved with Rei's help over the previous week were thin and light – white paper folded into Shide that looked almost like tiny paper thunder bolts along with flax tassels hanging from them in knotted intervals – and the giant bag they'd brought took ages to deplete. One after one they tied them around the trees that surrounded the lake, lapping it almost entirely (Ami had of course been precise in her research – they had exactly as many ropes as there were trees directly around the lakeside.)

Only walking the edge of the lake would have taken considerable time. Spending it tying tiny ribbons into ritual spirit-attracting ropes did not speed up the process at all. By the time they were done it was late afternoon, her stomach was howling at her, and the sky was starting to tint a red as bright as the leafs on the edge of the horizon when they once again met in the middle, at the looming statue of the ancient lovers they'd started out at.

Mamoru looked unfairly pretty with his hair a little windswept and his leather jacket rustling and the trees looking as if they greeted him.

Usagi shrugged it off and lifted the last items from her bag. All around the statue, she started springling salt in somewhat of a wider girth, then placed Rei's ofudas on the bases of each of the two stone people in front of her.

With a sigh, she sat.

"And now?" she mumbled, more rhetorical than anything. Her growling stomach knew and loathed the upcoming answer, of course.

He sighed, too. "Now we wait," he said, and stepped into the salt circle to sit at the base of the statue, and leant back against the guy.

With a sigh, she stepped into the circle too, and sat down next to him with embarrassingly bated breath. She leaned back, her streamers of hair falling against the stone pigtails of the woman in the statue, and then huffed grumpily.

Mamoru chuckled, his head leaning against the stone, and reached into the pocket of his leather jacket. When he pulled it back out, he was holding out two individually wrapped onigiris towards her.

Her eyes widened in impossible relief, and even when his chuckle turned almost condescending, she'd already torn off the wrapper off the first, greedily deposited the second in her lap without a thought that he might have wanted that one, and bit into the seasoned, fatty rice ball with the moan of a starving woman.

"I love you," she moaned absentmindedly in her food and then froze, eyes wide and heart stuttering in sudden panic. She had _not_ just said that.

But when she looked at him he was rolling his eyes at her good-naturedly and brushing it off, then pulled a third onigiri from his pocket and moved graceful, tapered fingers to artfully unwrap the thing.

She decided, as always, not to be offended.

Instead she nodded at his pockets. "How many of those are you hiding in there?" she mumbled with her mouth full.

He shot her a quick smirk, his shoulder touching hers. "Wouldn't you like to know."

She threw him a look, and bit into her onigiri with a contented moan.

A beat of silence passed before she nodded her head upwards towards the statue they were sitting against. "So, do you think it's them? Endymion and Serenity?" she murmured around her food, barely audible over her chewing.

He shrugged. "Could be, couldn't it?" Then he bit into his own onigiri. One dainty, tiny bite.

She copied his shrug almost exactly, mirrored on the shoulder touching him. "I don't actually know this legend very well, so I wouldn't know."

The look he threw her was entirely scolding. "You were going to go on this mission alone, Odango."

She shook her head at him in a 'duh' way. "Well I'm not, am I?" And then added a "I would have looked it up on the train here if it had just been me," into her food.

With an exaggerated roll of his eyes he pulled his phone from his pocket and started typing into his browser as she watched his fingers.

She raised her eyebrows.

With an entirely aggravatingly pompous tone, he started reading to her.

"'The Legend of Lake Yokai'," he started.

She sputtered at him and his phone. "Are you seriously reading Wikipedia to me right now?"

His look was menacing and annoyed and dismissive all at the same time. "I am, yes," he said simply.

She snorted.

But he read.

"The most consistent retelling of the legend is the following," he read in somewhat of a somber voice. "In the early days, a maiden from the Heavens descended down to Earth. She fell in love with a man who loved her in return. Driven to madness by her jealousy, another, who loved the man just as much, turned into a gruesome monster. But the couple's love conquered the threat, and using the power of their love, the maiden and the man banished the monster into the lake. Afterwards, they were lifted into Heaven together."

Then he cocked his head. "The site of the lake is a popular tourist spot for lovers and…" He shook his head, trailed off. "The next part is just about the statue itself."

She nodded with a deep sigh and a scrunch of her nose as Mamoru scrolled through the site for more info.

"Yeah, I remember that being a horrible love story," she said.

He threw her a look, his finger briefly stalling on his screen, then resuming. "I thought you didn't know the legend," he scoffed.

"I never said I didn't know the legend," Usagi huffed. "Just that I didn't know it WELL."

Mamoru made that amused little 'Ah'- sound he sometimes made at her that she couldn't really read and that tended to irritate her very much. The kind of look that looked both as if he found her endlessly adorable and even more silly. It had felt condescending for the majority of her late teenage years.

Usagi shrugged. "My parents met at this lake," she elaborated, and Mamoru's eyebrows lifted in surprise. "I've come here on family trips all throughout my childhood. They're kind of biased on this story being romantic, too."

"Oh," he said with a frown, and somehow that was the end to that conversation.

She picked at the crinkling plastic wrapper of her devoured onigiris, looking at her fingers, when Mamoru's hand appeared in her vision with another.

She blinked at his food offering. How many of these did he bring?

"Why do you think it's horrible?" he asked as she lifted the rice ball from his hands.

She scrunched her nose, and immediately ripped the wrapper off in whole; abrupt and violent, like a child tearing the wrapping paper off their birthday presents. "Well for one… The 'afterwards they ascended into heaven'-thing?" she threw him a disdainful look, bit into her onigiri, and continued talking as she chewed. "They died. They killed a poor woman whose only crime it was to want a man she couldn't have, dropped her in a lake, and then died doing it."

Mamoru laughed. A sharp, amused, tinkling sound that fell into an amused snort as he looked down at her in that way that always made the carnivorous butterflies in her stomach do a little munch.

"... this story is supposed to be romantic. This is a lover's tourist spot." His smirk was bright and sexy and thrown down at her over his shoulder and pretty much kind of infuriating.

She glared right back. "Yeah it's really not."

"So, you're telling me you feel sorry for the monster?" he said with a slight smile that spoke of things she didn't know how to interpret. But it was kind of warm, and made her falter.

She rolled her shoulder awkwardly and bit into her onigiri again. "It's a hard feeling. Not being wanted."

The look he threw her was kind of intense, kind of frowning, kind of scoffing. "What would _you_ know about not being wanted, Odango."

She whipped her head around to him and was so lost for words she sputtered. _Obviously_, she knew what it felt like. She was feeling it _right this second_. _Every_ second.

Mamoru seemed to notice something was off, because his eyes shifted hue and emotion and he tilted his head, and Usagi stubbornly tore her gaze from him and hit her head against the stupid statue.

The sky was mostly purple at this point, the sun just dipping over the horizon at the other side of the lake. It painted his face in deep shadows and made him unfairly even more attractive.

"Sun's almost down," she spat rather snappily.

But he kept gazing at her with a frown, those pretty-boy eyes studying her too intensely, and it was making her uncomfortable.

"Yeah," he said eventually. "We'll try again tomorrow."

She nodded curtly, stuffed the rest of the onigiri into her mouth, crumbled the wrapper and stuffed it in her pocket, and stepped out of the circle, dragging her feet through the salt.

"It's what, ghosts? Demons?" she said, nodding somberly at the lake. "I'm wholly unqualified to summon that anyway."

He stepped past the salt as well, hands back in his pockets. "Yeah, maybe it would have been better if Rei came."

_Pang_. Like a trigger pulled and shot directly into her heart and punching her in the gut. Wow, wasn't it petty that _that_ still hurt?

She almost felt dizzy, and stalked the steps back up to the ryokan like a woman with murder on her mind.

_What would you know about not being wanted, Usagi?_

My _ass_.

* * *

It all got fucking weird after that. Or she did. Or it was just always fucking weird.

Ever since that stupid Starlight Tower thing it had been weird, hadn't it?

But somehow the comment just got to her. It was _cruel_. She wanted him, she'd _always_ wanted him, she wanted him so badly, and yet he…

Why would he say something like that to her face?

Because this trip wasn't already painful enough, they'd _of course_ missed the fancy, many-coursed-meal dinnertime at the ryokan – though she supposed sitting in a room full of yukata'ed couples in a clearly marketed couple's retreat like this was something she wasn't prepared to do with Mamoru right now anyway, even if the price seemed a steep one to pay.

The trek down the country road to the conbini in the village had _looked_ way closer on the map and ended up taking them up and down two hills that would probably have left them winded if they weren't also superheroes, and standing behind him in line at the till had felt like the train ride all over again – her system just wasn't _prepared_ for so much Mamoru so constantly and so very close, right next to her.

They almost hadn't spoken at all the whole trip there, and still didn't as they left the comfortingly familiar neon sign of Family Mart behind either. Though Mamoru pretty much looked like he was vibrating with tension, staring at her oddly the whole time.

Her sudden shift in mood seemed to trouble him quite a bit, but it seemed he didn't know if it was his place to ask why.

And he was right. He wasn't allowed to ask. He was the source, after all. He'd always been.

Back in their hotel room, she fired on the water boiler to prepare her instant yakisoba, set it aside for the allotted 7 minutes, and dug into one of her two bought bentos straight out of the box, while Mamoru carefully broke his disposable chopsticks in a way that they came apart perfectly, no splinter astray, and obnoxiously elegantly lifted the contents of his single bento out of the black plastic box with his chopsticks onto a small plate he'd found in the side cabinet, and then poured the tea she didn't even notice when he'd had the time to prepare and poured it into her cup first before serving himself.

She couldn't help but glare at him and his shiny hair and his perfect hands across the coffee table, and the way he sat on his cushion the proper way, with his legs parallel and his bum on his heels and upright, not like her, cross-legged and slumped over on her floor seat.

Why did the guy have to be so friggin prim and proper and perfect and why did it have to turn her on like that?

Apparently he'd accepted the silent treatment though, and except for refilling her cup when it was empty, barely acknowledged that she was there, and the gurgle of the onsen water on their terrace and the noises of her eating (_he_ didn't make any noise, _of course_ he didn't) was the only sound between them for a long while.

It was way later, when he sunk into one of the plush couches with his book, folding his gorgeous legs one over the other and donning his glasses, that she broke, because she couldn't take his glasses, and him sitting there in the dim lighting and the full moon shining through the windows, and she couldn't take him, she couldn't.

And so, eating the wagashi that was meant for both of them on her own, she dropped opposite of him on the other couch, and, still glaring, broke the silence.

"Why do you think the stupid legend fits them?" she snapped.

He didn't throw her a look, didn't comment, instead, he calmly took off his glasses and answered as if she _hadn't_ just given him the silent treatment for three hours. "Well," he started with a slow shrug and an unmoving, blank face, "a maiden from the heavens. That could mean a goddess. In the myths around Endymion and Selene, Selene is the moon goddess coming down to Earth because she loves a mortal man. And if taken literally, a maiden from the heavens? The moon _is_ a celestial body."

She picked her flower-shaped confection apart and angry-ate it. "It's a silly legend around a silly lake."

His look was patient, if blank. "Legends stem from stories that are retold and retold and retold. Like fairy tales and gospels there's tons of versions. They stem from _somewhere_. It might just have been them. Who knows," he gave a shrug, and flipped his book back open, as if dismissing her.

She wouldn't have it, and scooted a little closer in the way-too-comfortable couch. "Wouldn't you be disappointed if Serenity and Endymion would have murdered that woman? They're supposed to be these great people we're supposed to protect."

"You're taking that legend way too literal, Usa," he remarked. "And after all, Serenity and Endymion _did_ die because of a jealous woman. It's not that far-fetched that it might just be another retelling of their story, albeit in a different version."

She shrugged uncomfortably.

But he continued on, seemingly having shifted to obnoxious teacher mode, and tried to make his point.

"Endymion and Selene; Selene as the moon goddess who, every time the moon dipped past the horizon in Asia Minor, disappeared from the sky because she was visiting her beloved mortal Endymion bestowed with eternal sleep. All these legends are clues. Even if the weird energy surrounding Lake Yokai isn't related to what we're looking for, if the legend _is_ about them, it could give us more clues for the future to find them."

She picked at the last of her candy, squished it a little between her fingers with a frown. "I don't think I like a single one of their legends."

Mamoru's eyes did that weird expressive thing that made her stomach lurch, but he didn't prompt her to speak, simply waited for her to do so.

And they _were_ all stupid. She hated most of them. Versions of the myths where it was she who gave eternal sleep to him so he would always be there where she wanted him to be; in others it where it was granted to him and he chose it over death, in others again where it was given to him because Hypno, the god of dreams, was in love with him and the god used it to keep him around, giving him lucid dreaming. They all were different versions of people she wouldn't like if they'd done these things to each other or to others.

"What do we do if the one is true where Serenity just made the dude fall asleep and then raped this guy for all eternity?"

He smirked. "What makes you think it wasn't consensual?"

She raised her eyebrow. "Locked in a cave as her eternal sex slave?"

He shrugged. "Maybe he was into it."

She rolled her eyes and threw him a look. "You mean maybe he was into HER. If he did that willingly, she must have been the biggest ever babe."

He gives her a long, lingering smile she couldn't read.

She couldn't take that look, and popped the candy she'd fiddled with into her mouth. "I think this lake is a waste of time. Again."

His smile slipped and his eyes turned in concern and she couldn't take that one, either.

"Since when are you that cynical?" he asked. "Isn't that more my job?"

She bristled. "I'm not." She crossed her arms again and leant back, but met his unwavering, calculating gaze. "Besides, I'm not as one-dimensional as you think. Happy people get to not like stupid legends about poor women in unrequited loves getting killed."

He frowned, and finally deposited his book on the couch next to him fully, letting go of it. "Why is this getting to you so much?" he asked in a concerned tone.

She broke eye contact and fidgeted. "I feel for her," she said awkwardly.

His brow lowered, looking like she was a puzzle he just couldn't solve, and laced in it was something that hurt to see.

"…Who is it that doesn't want you, Usako?" he whispered.

She inhaled sharply. He didn't call her that often. Usually only when he was deeply, deeply worried about her. Like when she was bleeding out from a stab-wound in Starlight Tower-worried.

She rubbed at her lips and looked out the window and towards the full moon, discomfort flooding her system as fast as irritation did, white-hot and with angry spikes and flushing, embarrassed, furious cheeks.

When she looked at him again, he was all concern, and all confusion, and… hurt?

No, this was unfair. He didn't get to be the one hurt. He was the one who _did_ the hurting. Constantly.

He didn't want her.

She knew it was petty, she knew she was wrong. It wasn't his fault and he wasn't to blame and they were friends, colleagues, whatever, and she had no claim on him. She had no right. He could want whomever he wanted and whomever he didn't, and she had no right to be angry and she was doing him wrong.

And yet she couldn't filter her snapping, angry tone.

"Baka," she spat the old insult. "You don't get it."

His tone and his eyes were patient and soft, and it made her even angrier. "What don't I get?"

She shook her head sharply. "Forget it," she bit, and got up from her couch.

"Usagi!"

She got up and stalked away and it was all getting to her. This stupid waste of a romantic room at a romantic lake. This stupid waste of a pittering, gorgeous private onsen with the most spectacular view right outside this window pane. This stupid waste of the past five years pining after this man. This stupid waste of her love.

It made her angry and it made her stupid and she didn't know why she was doing what she did next, except that the look in his eyes was priceless and the feeling it gave her was gratifying.

Holding his gaze, her own eyes fixed in a glare, she started stripping.

Lifting her oversized sweatshirt over her head, leaving her in her light pink cotton bra, she flung it back onto the tatami mats behind her and then went for her jeans skirt and wool tights.

He looked at her in utter horror, eyes fixed on her and wide and startled and panicked. "What... what are you doing," he breathed, his fingers clawing into the plush cushioning as if clawing himself into it.

With an angry yank, she was out of her tights, flung them off of her. They hit the wall and then the floor.

"There's an onsen on our terrace. I'm using it," she snapped, and in jerky, unsexy, angry movements, contorted to unclasp her bra.

"U...Usagi!" he stuttered. He'd grown pale. And he _stared_.

It made her feel impossibly strong for once.

Stepping out of her underwear and final piece of clothing, she stood in front of him completely nude, the moonlight shining off her hair in the dim light, and silence fell thick and heavy, the gurgle and pitter of the hot spring once again flooding her senses when neither of them spoke for a brief, staring second.

He looked absolutely frozen.

She found her voice first, and to her surprise it was still the same level of confident, even if it had lost some of the angry edge.

"You can join me if you want," she said, turned on her heel, and stalked past symmetrically placed toiletries into the shower, and blasted the water on full.

The spray was cold and she shivered and grit her teeth but didn't regret what she'd done, even if she knew it was petty, and she rubbed the washcloth angrily across her skin until it was pink and raw and then yanked the bobby pins and elastic out of her wet hair and twisted the whole mass into a messy, giant bun atop her head.

The onsen, after she'd padded naked with her butt in full view of the floor-to-ceiling windows to climb the matte black stairs to sink into it, was scalding hot and she hissed through her teeth and grabbed one of the small buckets and filled it with the hot, steaming water to pour over the top of her body so she acclimatised faster.

It took her only a few moments until she could sink down fully and sit on the small raised seat on the side of the tub, the natural stone rim surrounding her in a way that it looked like she was sitting in a tiny, boiling lake next to that pretty, big, non-boiling lake.

Her breath came out in puffs and joined the steam, and the full moon reflecting off the lake so prettily and shimmery made the whole thing feel so surreal she could just about believe that this was all just a weird dream and she _hadn't_ just flashed the man she'd had wet dreams about since the day she'd first had wet dreams.

But the water soothed her tense muscles and relaxed her in a way that made it all not so bad.

She was a dumb idiot. She'd proved that many a time. She was allowed to do dumb idiot things. If anyone got away with dumb idiot things, it was her. She'd laugh it off tomorrow.

But then all the tension in her muscles returned all at once, because behind her, the shower had turned on again, and her breath had never come in staccato like this.

Nevermind the fact that Chiba Mamoru was currently most likely to be naked behind her, in an illuminated white room with only a milky, almost-transparent film of sliding door and her turned back separating them, she had to tell herself that surely – _surely_ – he was only getting ready for bed. He wasn't gonna…

Holding her breath, she turned her head. She couldn't help it.

She snapped her neck back immediately, so fast it almost hurt, and if she hadn't been flushed already from the scalding water, she would have been so now.

Mamoru was indeed in that shower. She could clearly see his blurry, bright, _naked_ silhouette through the milky sliding door, bending to rub what she knew had been the _only_ washcloth in that shower, the one _she_ had used, across his naked – _naked_ – skin.

She felt almost dizzy, her skin exploding in intense tingles to the deafening sound of the sliding door quietly falling open, and his feet silently padding behind her.

She didn't turn her head and it took all her strength, when with a splash of water rushing out past the rim and a hiss from between his teeth against the heat, Mamoru joined her. Mamoru who was currently stark naked.

She couldn't help it, she whirled to the side in the onsen that suddenly seemed to have shrunk immensely in size in her perception, wide-eyed and flushing, and with a final splash he'd lowered himself fully into the water. Naked. Beside her.

Naked. Mamoru. _Naked_.

The hot spring was just that tiny, miniscule bit milky, and she thanked every god because holy shit Mamoru was naked beside her and looking at her as if he won the smug contest while she whirled back around and stubbornly looked up towards the view.

But when she chanced a glance back, all the smug had left his lips, and instead, he almost self-consciously rubbed his arm. His cheeks were as flushed as hers, his jaw locked, his hair wet and slicked back across his scalp with a few tendrils fighting their way back across his forehead stubbornly, his broad chest and dark nipples peeking from the water, droplets of fluid running down across his pecs, and he looked almost as nervous as her and refused to meet her gaze this time.

If she were to scoot over just… maybe half the width of her thigh, she would be touching Mamoru's naked skin.

She didn't _need_ more fuel for her fantasies about him, let's be real. She _didn't_. And yet she somehow knew this right here would last her for a lifetime, probably. The lonely nights of her future in the dark with her hot pink toys, all being filled up with content right this second, touching herself to the fantasy of how in another life instead of both of them uncomfortably staring out across the lake, he might have turned towards her, might have started touching her in the water, pulling at her pink nipples that grazed the edge of the water just so, might have started running his tongue down her throat as she got up on her knees to climb on top of him to slowly sink down on his stiff cock.

Her breath came labored and she snapped her eyes back to the lake and she was so deeply, deeply ashamed for thinking these thoughts. He didn't deserve this. She was despicable. They were _friends_.

It was her traitorious mind that reminded her that friends _usually_ weren't in the habit of regularly masturbating to the image of their fantasy-version fucking them silly in what-if versions of all their memories of them.

And they also didn't get heart-palpitations when sitting next to them in an innocent onsen.

She was clearly making him nervous with her behavior.

She was aware of every single movement of her body, of the rise of her chest as she breathed and the way her shoulders and the tops of her breasts poked out of the water, of the way the skin that hit the air rose in goosebumps even when the water she sat in was so warm, about the way the tendrils of hair that escaped her messy bun curled against her face in the steam, of the flushed, red mess her face was doubtlessly in as she had trouble breathing through her nose and puffed the air out through trembling lips instead.

And so, a nervous wreck already, what better way to make this whole thing even worse and admit horrible, atrocious truths she'd never uttered even to herself to the man she loved who was currently naked; truths that were bound to make him like her even less than he already did.

And yet they tumbled from her mouth.

"Sometimes I don't want to find them," she whispered into the foggy steam. "Endymion and Serenity."

She felt him shift his eyes to her, but she didn't dare look up.

"I know it's horrible of me to say. I'm supposed to be the leader of the frigging Senshi. At least in name, and so on. I never wanted any of this. But deep down, I really, _really_ don't want to find _her_."

The water splashed a little and he moved. Her eyes flitted to the corner of her eye, and her breath hitched. Quarter of her thigh now, and they'd be touching.

"Sometimes I'm terrified you'll find her, and she will be all you'd hoped her to be…"

She closed her eyes and held her breath, the gurgle of the pipes even louder here, and the wind rustling in the bamboo and the trees, and some kind of bird hooting in the distance, and the smack of Mamoru's lips as he tried to find words or something.

"Usako what… what do you think I would hope her to be…?"

She exhaled harshly. He sounded so utterly oblivious and it was making her angry again.

She'd spelled it out so clearly in the past and he had chosen to ignore it. Why didn't she even _register_ in his peripherie? Why didn't he just…

It was that spike of angry, bitter jealousy – of what she wasn't even sure. Of something. Of not being his. Of not being wanted by him, that surged through her veins and made her be a bold asshole.

And so she shifted, and moved, and came too close_, touching, touching, touching_, and invaded his personal space in a way that would have been wildly inappropriate even if he were wearing clothes.

His eyes blew up and he leaned back and his breath puffed out in shock and… and… Droplets of water cascaded down his face like tears, and she could feel his harsh breathing on her lips, and she could have leaned forward and kissed all the non-tears away.

Instead, she just watched him, leaning in. His lips… he licked them, staring at her lips in return, a little noise escaping his throat that didn't seem altogether voluntary, and one more shift of her legs and his breath came out in a breathy, tortured whine when she straddled his lap, hovering above him with her knees clamped around his thighs and she'd just…

She could see the effect. She could see the vein popping in his neck, the harsh way he breathed, the way his lips fixated on her lips, her breasts, her nipples right in front of him, her eyes. The way his own eyes shone shocked and needy. Could feel the barest brush of his straining, twitching cock against her thigh, just ever so barely not at her pussy.

She only had to sit down and slip herself onto his cock to make her fantasy and all her wet dreams come to life, and from the look in his eyes, she was pretty sure he'd let her.

Her knees quivered with the strain to stay upright.

And she would only have to nudge forward just that little bit, crane her neck, tilt her face, and she could kiss him.

He looked as if he wanted her to.

(Or maybe he was really, really in pain. One of those anyway.)

She ended up pulling back, getting off him, and he whimpered again. But when she was no longer touching him, he was exhaling harshly, as if relieved, and it broke something in her.

He cried out again, this time when she abruptly stood and rose from the water, flashing him in the process, the blonde curls of her pubic hair dripping water right in front of his face, and she could see the way his eyes dropped there and flew back up but couldn't find anything that was safe to look, and he flushed and checked her out all the same and flushed and flushed some more, frozen and rendered absolutely speechless.

She didn't speak when she noisily stepped from the onsen, and he didn't either, and yet she saw him run his hands through his hair and drop the back of his head back against the natural stones as he all but collapsed in the water and breathed heavily.

She finally calmed down enough to feel every last ounce of mortification when she stood naked in front of the mirror and the washbasin and frantically pulled towels from the low shelf to bury herself in or maybe try to suffocate herself with.

The ground was allowed to swallow her up any moment now.

It didn't, and she freed her damp hair from the bun and yanked a towel through it and all but ripped at her duffel bag, frantically searching, pulling out things along the way wildly and leaving them strewn around. Finally, she found her comically oversized Sailor V fan T-Shirt, pulled it over her head, and, not bothering with underwear, she slapped the lightswitch and dove hiding beneath the covers of her futon.

It took forever until she heard him emerge from the onsen, and after that she heard the shower run. And why he showered again _after_ bathing she had no idea, but this took quite a while as well. And then she squeezed her eyes shut and pretended to sleep, her face turned to the wall and her back to his futon, because when she heard his padding feet shuffling, she knew he was still naked, of course.

His deep sighs rang through the room, and with a painful thudding of her heard, she realised he was standing right at the foot of her futon in the dark.

It felt like forever again, but was probably only about half a minute until she heard him move and fabrics rustle and his own comforter being pulled back.

She could hear each individual heartbeat as if it were a hammer against metal in her chest.

She had never been so uncomfortable. Sleep, for the first time in her life, was absolutely impossible.

And her heart stuttered even harder when his voice rang out in barely a whisper, it was so low.

"Goodnight, Usako…"

She pretended to sleep.

He didn't. She saw the color of her wall change with sudden, dim light with what she supposed was the glare of his phone screen in the dark, and her own phone, the time shown on the otherwise black standby-screen, told her that he didn't switch it off for _hours_.

It was two hours that felt like two _years_ later that he put his phone aside, and half an hour more until his breathing had evened.

She gave it half an hour more to be absolutely sure he was asleep that she finally braved turning around.

She shifted underneath her sheets and swallowed harshly around the painful lump in her throat.

His face was turned towards her futon – so, so, so close, the futons only the width of his feet apart – one leg was curled around his comforter and she could see he was only wearing boxer briefs and nothing else. His face was smoothed out, all the frowny lines he brooded with so often gone from it, his eyelashes resting prettily against his cheeks in a way that made her jealous of him, the moon shining big giant shadows across his chiseled form through the window.

He was heartbreakingly beautiful. Her heart was literally aching looking at him. And she was so absolutely embarrassed about what she'd done to him today.

She didn't even notice how far she'd scooched over on her futon until her hand landed on the tatami mat between the futons. And because she'd apparently gone _completely_ insane now, absolutley fucking _mental_, what the _fuck_, _Usagi_ – the realisation made her not retreat back, but forward.

But like someone looking for a restraining order in their future, she bent forward, propping herself up on her elbow and now _lying on his futon_, she watched him.

She was so close. Close, close, close, close, close. And because apparently, she was now weirder than she had ever been in her life _ever_ (and that _meant_ something), she inhaled his scent. Shampoo and soap and clean and roses and Mamoru.

And then his eyes just flipped open and his eyebrow rose at her and she wanted to implode on the spot.

"What the hell are you doing, Odango?" he rumbled, voice scratchy and low.

She felt like choking, fumbled for words, frozen in his bed, hovering above him. "Just um... just umm..."

And then choking was totally last year, because what even _was_ breath, because with an abrupt motion he'd rolled them over and now it was him hovering on top of her with intense eyes, inhaling, and brushing his fingers into her hair, and by god she couldn't _breathe_.

"What are you doing, Odango?" he whispered, the same words so much softer now, breathed against her mouth leaning in, watching her lips and she _died_.

The energy between them was so charged she was surprised she wasn't screaming at the top of her lungs, her heart hammering in her throat and her chest and her teeth, everything within her trying desperately not to vomit out her heart, or to kiss him.

And he wasn't making it easier with the way he just… hovered over her, his nose almost touching hers, his eyes so close they had to jump between hers to return her panicked, worked up stare, and she could feel his harsh breath on her lips and it was like small, electric jolts that had no business turning her on like this, and his thumb stroked her temple in that tantalisingly, heartbreakingly tender way that had no business breaking her heart like this, because she wanted him. She wanted him so, so much.

She looked up, wide eyed and nervous and scared and turned on and had a decision to make, and suddenly denial and hurt felt harder than it had ever before.

It was surprising, really, how abruptly, how immediately, how intensely he responded when she leaned up, uncomfortably raking her neck towards him to capture his lips. How he moaned into her mouth as if she'd fulfilled his every lasting wish and with a yank pressed her down into the mattress, his hands in her hair clenching and turning insistent, and when she gasped, his tongue found hers and it was all over.

Restraint? What was restraint? She would have this man, and only he could stop her – but it really didn't look like she would encounter much resistance. Her head did that last rational thing where it spared a brief moment to remember whether or not she'd taken her pill this morning, and whether or not the condom forever in her purse was expired, and on the way she'd apparently made up her mind what this night would hold for them, teammates and past heartbreak and possible future heartbreak and consequences be damned.

His tongue felt rough and frantic in her mouth and so did his hands, travelling with muffled groans beneath her Sailor V shirt and finding her naked butt.

It wasn't their first kiss. It wasn't even their second, or their third. It wasn't even the first time his hands had been on her ass, or gripping her thighs as desperately as that.

The first they'd shared back at the Princess D ball, back before either of them knew who the other was. The second had been entirely her fault, and ended disastrously, and almost ended their friendship – if you would have been able to call it that at that point. The third had been his fault, only months ago, something he'd apparently regretted the next day and pretended had never happened, and it had gone too far but not nearly far enough.

She would make sure this one would go all the far there was.

This, she knew, was a terrible mistake. But how could a mistake feel so overwhelmingly _right_?

He broke his kiss only to frantically push up her shirt over her head, with wide, wide eyes and his breathing so harsh he seemed unhinged or freaked out or both, and he flung it away from her with an audible whimper and then his mouth latched onto her nipple even as she frantically kicked his boxer briefs down his legs in equally clumsy, sudden, almost-panicked movements.

"You're so perfect," he mumbled into her skin, voice crazed and husky and worked up, his hands gripping into her ass and her thigh and pressing her against him, and she gripped his hair in a tight hold. "So, so, so perfect."

His chin was slightly scratchy, his stubble brushing against her skin roughly as he kissed and bit and licked and sucked at her nipple, then wildly up her breast, her neck, her throat, pulling at her leg, and it felt amazing and he was never allowed to do anything else ever again but touch her in this way. She couldn't bear it if he didn't.

She couldn't bear it if he wasn't hers.

She sucked the skin of his throat harshly, nibbling and biting and pulling, and he groaned into her and kneaded his hands into her skin even more firmly. When she released his throat with a pop, it was red and purple and bruising and she'd marked him. Evidence that he'd been hers for at least this night and it would be on his skin for at least a couple days, maybe a few more, and it rushed arousal through her system so harshly it was dizzying.

She was shaking in need and tension and _almost – _he was almost, almost hers if she pretended hard enough, just for this moment in this room in the dark, she could pretend, and she trembled with arousal slick and tormenting and excusicating and immediate, like a drug coursing straight through her veins and eating her up in a feverish burn.

His cock was hard and damp with precum, pressing and smearing against her abdomen in a way that made her cry out in sheer want, needy and pathetic and a whimper so pitiful it almost hurt to hear herself – but it caused a rumbling moan of his against her ear so deep and so sexy it made her even wetter.

With ragged breathing, she harshly jerked against him, rubbing herself underneath his body in a way that aligned them just right, and he gasped into her mouth and pulled harshly on her hair when his cock twitched hard, right against her clit.

She was so slippery, her own wetness dribbling down her thighs and coating his cock and when he moved and slipped, rocking, moving with a wet, obscene munching sound against her, she had to bite her lip and arch her back and keen until he groaned and freed her lip from her abuse, sucking it harshly into his own mouth.

She was trembling, quivering and weak and exquisitely overwhelmed, and his swollen cock against her clit and lips, and his whimpering breaths, almost as if he was crying as he rocked so frantically against her, rolling his hips and burying his hands into her hair - it was all such torment, and she needed nothing more than for him to finally thrust that perfect cock into her, fuck her through this night and make her his forever.

And then one of his hands slipped down between them, spread her lips and he was sliding against her clit up and down her slit even more intensely, and it was too much, it was just _too much_, and so she begged.

"Put it in," she cried into his mouth, wide-eyed and frantic. "Please," she cried, begging him to fuck her.

But that seemed to wake him up.

To her horror, and a heartbreak that was more intense than all of them put together, his eyes widened and his lips detached from her body with a pop and he sat up abruptly on his knees, panting and hard and dripping with their combined arousal, and pushed his hands into his hair with apology in his eyes and waiting to fall from his lips.

Her sob came first.

"Don't," she warned, and rolled over.

* * *

_Yes. This is a multichapter. It will have a second part lol. Hope I got you excited for it! AND I hope you enjoy it, please let me know, I want all your thoughts on this!_

_Anyway, I'm currently grumpy and demotivated and needy and sitting at home with a painful, horrid UTI and am SO NEEDY, so please feed me in reviews I'm in dire need of them and validation, LOL._


	2. Chapter 2

_Guys thank you so much for the overwhelmingly nice response and well-wishes? There were even some of you that have never reviewed for me before and it MADE ME SO HAPPY, so thank you guys for reaching out, and I hope you like the end as much as you liked the beginning!_

_Thanks go to my wonderful beta, Uglygreenjacket. I'm a pain sometimes and you always got my back. Thank you, love! And also thank you to Antigone2: thanks you for being so willing to cheer for me, too!_

_So yeah, here's the second and last part (with lots of backstory, promise, lol!)! I hope you enjoy it!_

* * *

There were memories that weighed like ghosts on her mind. They whispered, 'what if...', and of things she could have done differently, of things she should have said but didn't, and they never really let her go. Most times she could file them away to the deepest corner of her heart and let them rest. But sometimes - always out of the blue, always suddenly - they came back to haunt her in the night, flashing bright and insistent and hurtful, whispering to her of lost opportunities and regret and hope that turned to dust in her mouth. And then they scolded her, cold and harsh in quiet hushes, that she ought to not open her heart enough to care.

What if she'd acted like a normal person when they'd met? Someone with normal grades and no abusing-people-as-trashcans and normal hair and normal speaking volume and not so many insults. Would he have looked at her twice, then?

What if she'd been reflected enough to admit to herself that it was jealousy she'd felt when she'd first heard Rei talk about him like that, approach him like that. What if she'd talked to him before that, or maybe with Rei? What if _she'd _started dating him that time, not Rei? Back when it was still easy, when there were no masks and magical suits complicating them yet?

What if she'd said 'I love you', or maybe 'don't leave me' when she'd woken up that night in the hospital and found him in the chair beside her bed with concerned, red-rimmed eyes - that time after everything and nothing had happened at Starlight Tower and Mamoru-Baka was suddenly Tuxedo Mask and he'd been willing to die for her had she not been willing to do the same and pushed him out of the trajectory at the last second?

What if she'd confessed her love - _understood _her love - instead of kissing him, months after that? When it was all complicated and they were suddenly teammates and there was still Rei who was so hurt when he'd broken up with her, and he'd felt so bad about the stitches on Usagi's belly with his eyes so torn, and her heart was screaming at her every time she saw him?

What if she'd not cried afterwards, but instead laughed and sighed in relief when _he'd _kissed _her _that time, just months ago, when Kunzite had captured her and it had taken forever to free herself and she'd collapsed in his trembling, shivering arms afterwards? Would he have wanted to keep her, then?

What if, that same night when his hands had wandered and she'd whimpered into his mouth and wanted him to go on, she'd said so? What if, the next day, when he sat with his legs folded at the Senshi meeting at Hikawa, not even pretending to listen to Minako's analysis of all their mistakes with the Kunzite incident, and he'd acted so harsh and hard and as if nothing had happened, yet his steady eyes on her shining at her as if she was his biggest regret of his life - what if she'd let him see her tears afterwards, what if she'd screamed her confusion and her heartbreak at him, told him he was everything she'd ever wanted, and why the hell could he not want her back?

All her ghosts were wide awake and screaming at her across a lake and right into her mind as she held her breath and tried not to cry and hid in her futon with her back turned to him under the glare of the moon. It hurt so much she felt like splitting apart.

* * *

In all her life, Usagi had never felt so awkward and utterly rejected as she had that night; on his futon in this room, with Mamoru's eyes so apologetic and terrified and wide.

When she woke up, Mamoru sat in his yukata and his glasses at the farthest end of the couches, hair damp from what looked like a morning dip in the onsen and she immediately got brought back to last night.

He looked up helplessly and startled when she crawled from the depths of her futon stark naked, pulled on her crumbled Sailor V nightshirt flung to her side of the floor with an embarrassed flush to her cheeks, and sneaked off to the bathroom. She breathed with her head in her hands on the toilet seat, and pulling herself together enough to emerge, she decided to do the same as he did, and without looking him in the eye, stalked past him and out towards the onsen.

The lake looked incredibly peaceful in the morning and it didn't fit her mood at all, and she was painfully aware that Mamoru was sitting right next to the floor to ceiling windows behind her when she stepped back into the steaming water, but she didn't turn to look and see if he was looking.

When she went back inside, he wasn't there. It finally gave her the time for a quick, painful cry as she sat on the wicker stool and pulled her hair back into her signature buns.

She took her time, brushed her teeth until her gums hurt, sniffling all the way, and glared very hard at the little film strip as she took her pill, because what the fuck did she need that for anyway.

When he still wasn't back after she'd donned her own yukata, she shrugged on her brown haori jacket and slipped her feet into the sturdy outdoor slippers and ventured outside.

She'd missed dinner at this fancy thing, she wasn't missing breakfast, too.

The maître d' asked for her room number with a friendly bow and then lead her to a table already decked with food and that Mamoru already sat at with his book.

She froze, and his eyes looked like he didn't fare much better.

"Good morning…" he croaked.

That shook her from her stupor, and she sat, holding her yukata closed with her hand at her knees as she bent to slip into the wooden bench opposite of him. "Good morning," she mumbled at the table.

He smacked his lips, his hands were restless, then he spoke, clipped and tortured and strained. "Listen, Usako–"

She shook her head sharply and felt his hard frown at her.

"How did you sleep?" she asked in a voice that sounded as fake as a voice could sound, but she desperately needed to change the subject.

She just couldn't face rejection in a place where she was entirely surrounded by happy couples and families.

He pursed his lips. "I didn't."

She blinked down at her food. A perfectly grilled and honeyed salmon on a banana leaf, small dishes of sauces and rice and egg and miso surrounding it. It looked completely unappetizing all of a sudden.

"Oh," she murmured.

"Usagi, maybe we should..." he tried again, voice tense.

The hurt was familiar, almost an old friend. But it had never felt so strong, so heightened, so ugly in her veins. That was wholly new, and it screamed at her from ever pore in her veins, as if the hurt had become its own, angry entity in her very blood.

It caused her to snap at him. "I don't want to hear," she snapped with a glare, and he closed his mouth shut into a tense line.

* * *

It had always confused her, all of them, really, the whole thing with that night and the rainbow crystals. So very, very confusing, all of it, and on top of that this overwhelming and emotional clusterfuck of all the intensity of a teenage-girl's pining heart writing in her diary late at night and throwing each other into harm's way in order to protect… It remained confusing to this day, every part of it, even when her heart had aged.

Altogether, the night most of her ghosts swarmed so wildly around had been an absolute disaster - even if in a way and for reasons no one had anticipated it.

The night their enemy had gotten hold of all the rainbow crystals, it had changed her life.

It was a weird memory. Uncomfortable always. Particularly because she didn't remember everything of it, what with falling unconscious and bleeding from a giant stab wound. They'd transformed in front of each other in the biggest shock of her life and then everything had happened so fast. Zoisite and Kunzite had gotten the crystals, Mamoru had jumped in front of her when that spike was aimed for her, and with an anguished cry she'd managed to push him out of the way at the last second, but got hit herself in the process.

Tuxedo Mask had carried her out of there as Usagi, his pristine white dress shirt soaked red with her blood. She remembered his panicked, babbling voice coaxing her to stay awake, coarse, ripped strips of the fabric of his cape tied too tight around her to keep her from losing ALL her blood, to keep her alive just long enough. The bright neon lights as someone transferred her somewhere and someone in scrubs leaning over her to promise her everything would be OK.

When she woke up it was the middle of the night and apparently about a week later and Mamoru was sitting in the chair beside her bed with wide eyes and awkward words.

She'd later found out from Luna he'd been there every day, and every night, too. When visitor hours were over and even her parents had to leave, he'd snuck back in. Every single night. But after she'd woken up, his visits had stopped.

She'd asked him about it a year later, when the anniversary of her date with near-death came up and her parents had made a fuss about it. Why had he watched over her like that?

_"I know what it's like to wake up in a hospital alone. I didn't want you to go through that," he'd admitted in a quiet voice with averted eyes and an uncomfortable shrug._

It had been the day she had finally, _finally _realised that this was not a flimsy crush. That this was nothing she could ignore. She would love this kind, amazing man until she could no longer love.

But it was a realisation that had come too late. It came only after she'd already fucked up.

It had happened during those tentative first few months, when Mamoru was gradually integrated into the group and it had all been so fresh and so stressful and so panicked. When not only they, but the enemy as well, knew his civilian identity and they still thought Queen Beryl had gotten her hands on the silver crystal - she'd had all the rainbow crystals after all! - when they'd been panicked and wary and they didn't know yet that, for some reason, absolutely nothing had come of those stupid prism rocks that had given them all so much grief. Everyone back to square one. No crystal, no princess, no leads. Both for them and the enemy.

It was the days when the Dark Kingdom, in their confusion and loss, had lashed out every day and run them raw. Not like today, when Kunzite and Zoisite still popped up from time to time, doing shit that gave them work, but so far and few between, as tired of the search as they were.

She'd only just found out that Rei and Mamoru hadn't dated anymore practically since the incident, and Mamoru had finally, after months of Rei trying to get him to react, sat her down and broken her heart.

They were teammates now, he'd said. That it wouldn't be right. That they had a responsibility that went beyond, he'd said, and from what Rei told the girls afterwards, had never looked her in the eye.

Usagi had felt hurt and broken and she didn't know why, didn't understand. Attributed it towards anger for her friend whose heart he'd twisted apart.

She'd been an angry, irrational, confused and terrified teenager, and she'd almost knocked down this other hurt and confused teenager's door and screamed and screamed at him. He'd only taken it. Mute, his eyes shining at her as if he wanted anything but her to react like that, and as if he couldn't look away.

But his eyes had broken her and made her stupid and weak and she'd crawled on top of him and pressed him into his couch and stolen his kiss right from his lips.

His hands had clutched and clawed into her back, pressing her closer even as she invaded his mouth with her tongue and her confusion and her anger and her feelings, and soon his lips had become as frantic as hers.

She'd stopped, yanking back in shock and humiliation and shame, when she'd finally tasted the tears that soaked his face and salted his lips.

She'd run.

She'd been so confused. So ashamed - what would Rei _think_? And yet, he'd hovered close. Sought her out, hung around with questioning, vulnerable eyes, always there, even when she didn't always directly see him. Waiting.

Until he stopped.

"Isn't he with Rei?" Naru had asked in that concerned, but slightly judging tone, when Usagi had confessed to kissing him, because she couldn't tell the girls, because she couldn't face having betrayed her friend.

"I thought you didn't like him," Naru went on, walking beside her down towards the Crown. "You've never said a single nice word about him…"

She'd kneaded her knuckles and tried not to scream how wrong she'd been, how stupid she'd been.

"And… he's not exactly been nice to you, either, Usagi-chan…"

Naru's voice had been all comfort, all friendly concern, all logic and making sense.

"I don't know if I feel comfortable with the thought of you being with someone who has only ever insulted you, Usagi…"

She'd swallowed the lump in her throat. She couldn't explain. How could she explain that no, actually, he'd saved her life a lot. That she'd given as bad as she'd got. That it had all been… what had it been?

That no, actually, she thought she might just be so in love it ripped her in half and hurt her to breathe. Something she needed to ignore because what right did she have, when Rei...

"Maybe you're right," she'd whispered instead, eyes on her feet.

But that same day was the day that Mamoru had stopped giving her that look, and stopped talking to her in that budding, friendly way he'd only just started to, and when she'd finally confessed to Rei she'd faced the fact she'd almost ruined things with her, too, and had started the slow, careful road of rebuilding trust.

Rei and her had been perfectly alright, after just a little while. Yet, Mamoru and her? She had seemingly doomed them to always be a little awkward.

* * *

She'd never eaten so slow and tasteless in her life, and she'd never cursed a waiter for bringing more and more food to their table in her life before this day.

They'd politely sat through every course, and she felt so tense and stupid and humuliated and utterly, completely unwanted afterwards, she was hard pressed not to walk off the premises in just this blue ryokan-owned yukata all the way to the train station, and all the way home and into her bed and then cry for a century.

"We should head back to the site," Mamoru mumbled beside her when they walked out into the courtyard.

She frowned down at their matching yukatas. "Like this?"

He gave an emotionless, blank shrug. "Why not get this over with sooner than later."

She swallowed hard. Damn that hurt.

The stupid lake was still stupid calm, but walking back towards the statue filled her with a weird sense of dread the closer they got to it.

She'd be sitting next to Mamoru for god knows how many hours now.

She hovered a little, everything inside of her screaming to run, and yet Usagi crossed back into a circle with a slow step.

_Pang_.

She clutched her chest, her heart aching, and she suddenly felt dizzy for just a second - it was over just as quickly. Weird. Had that happened before?

Mamoru, oblivious to anything going on in her heart like apparently always, stepped into the circle too and knelt on the stone base of the statue, touching his hand to the ground and closing his eyes and doing his thing.

His psychometry always looked absolutely, inconspicuously unassuming. Not like her sparkly brand of candy magic.

He frowned, opened his eyes and gazed thoughtfully across the lake, his glasses perched a little lower on his nose. "It feels different from yesterday…" he mumbled.

Usagi knelt down, too, moving absolutely stiffly. "Different how?" she asked, voice tense.

His frown deepened as he settled with his back against his part of the statue. "I'm not entirely sure," he said, voice distant as if lost in thought.

Leaning against the statue with her back to the ofudas once more, as well, she again settled in to channel whatever spirit might answer if this whole thing should work.

She frowned. The ofuda itched weirdly at her back.

She leaned her head back against the statue and closed her eyes, trying as hard as she could to calm her raging, hurt emotions, but it was somewhat of a lost cause.

He didn't speak.

When, a little later, he flipped his book open and began to read, she was ready to rip it from his hands and throw it in the bloody lake.

How the _hell _was he so calm. Why the _hell _did this not _affect _him–

She took a few deep, calming breaths, and did not end up vandalizing his property. She felt like she'd earned a pat on the shoulder or something. She closed her eyes again, tried her hardest to doze off.

About half the pages of his book had wandered from one side to the other, the sun now coming from the other side of the statue, when Usagi finally burst in nervous, agitated energy, hours later.

"This isn't working," she hissed, opening her eyes.

He closed his book with a dull little thud, set it aside, took his glasses off, and looked up ahead into the trees when he finally spoke - not in that flirty way over his shoulder as he'd done the day before.

"What is supposed to happen anyway?" he murmured.

She balled her hands into fists. "Not sure," she ground out. "Rei said something about this channeling the spirits into us or something. Until they speak to us."

His brow furrowed. "Well, I don't feel anything. Do you?"

She glared onto her hands, then shivered. It _was _kind of cold in the breeze and the yukata…

"You ok?" he asked in concern.

"Fine," she bit out between her teeth.

The look on his face didn't ease, and it was her turn to stubbornly stare straight ahead as he assessed her.

"Do you want a take a break and grab a bite to eat?" he finally said.

She ground her teeth. "I'm not hungry."

His frown turned absolutely bewildered.

He was about to speak when she interrupted him with pressed out, tense words – she didn't even really know where they were coming from. She didn't want to hear this. She couldn't hear this.

But here they were. Spoken. Out loud. Honest and vulnerable and bleeding.

"Why didn't anything happen after we kissed back then, after Starlight Tower?" Her voice sounded like an angry hiss. Accusing.

_Why don't you want me?_

The bewilderment on his face grew impossibly larger. But he did answer eventually.

"Because you didn't want it to," he said matter of factly, his voice almost as accusing as hers.

She whirled around to face him, shook the itching, burning ofuda off her back in the process. "Ex_cuse _me?!" she snarled.

His glare was furious. "You told your friend. I was walking behind you."

She almost physically recoiled. "_What_?" she said, voice angry and confused and so, so angry. "What the hell are you talking about?!"

But all the fight seemed to leave his shoulders even when the tension did not, and he shook his head sharply. "It's old news, Usagi. It doesn't matter. Let's just focus."

It was dismissive. He was all tense muscle and clenched jaw and perfect man, and it was all so infuriating she could barely breathe.

"No," she demanded. "You're going to talk to me."

He inhaled sharply, jaw clenched and set, and he got up.

She was ready to run shouting after him when he stopped abruptly, looking at the ground.

"The salt circle isn't full. There's a gap," he said towards the ground, his voice abruptly changing.

She was so angry it felt like fire in her veins. Was he changing the subject _again_?

"Mamoru, I _swear–_"

He interrupted her and it caused her to bristle in anger.

"Usagi _why _is the circle not complete?" He sounded freaked out.

"I don't know!" she shouted "Maybe it blew away overnight or something! It's just salt!"

He shook his head. "It's not just salt. It's a spiritual ritual performed by a Senshi. It can't be blown away. You must have done something wrong."

The accusation made her _boil_. "What the fucking _hell_, baka."

She turned to stalk off in a cloud of anger. Always the _fucking _same, never trusting her, never wanting her.

She was stopped by Mamoru's hand around her arm.

"Usako–"

She glared at him. Then she shook his arm off of her violently with the deadliest look she'd ever thrown anyone, and walked off.

The moment she stepped over the salt, that same pang again – it hurt, but no more dizziness. Just blind, sharp, painful hurt and on top of it, so much stabbing anger.

How _dare _he. How _dare _he not want her?

"Usagi!" he shouted after her. She barely got to the first line of trees, and somehow, she hadn't noticed until now that all the ropes they'd hung were _shaking_, the tassles flying wildly in the wind like her anger.

"STOP!" she yelled, and his eyes widened. Her voice sounded strange, almost doubled. An energy in her veins she didn't know, that seemed to glow out of her, red like her rage, and it seemed to frighten the bejesus out of him. He froze.

Good. He could go to hell.

His voice was suddenly so, so small. He approached her like he would a wild animal. "Usako… Look at me."

She hissed at him.

He blanched.

"Usako, I think it did work," he said carefully, inching closer towards her, hands held out. "But the wrong spirit answered… The monster…"

His words yanked through her blood, flared up all the energy surrounding her in a wild flash that made him jump back.

"She's NOT a monster," Usagi screamed at him in her strange double-voice, which then turned into something that was half a scream and half a sob. "It doesn't make her a monster just because he didn't want her!"

He exhaled harshly, and with a flick of his finger, he willed a rose into existence and transformed.

She stepped back, looking at him incredulously, betrayal on her heart and in her eyes.

The next words he spoke to her came from behind a mask, and it made her skin tingle and itch and made her want to howl and scream.

"Usako…" he said, voice still so careful, hands still held out towards her. "I think something's wrong with you…"

"What the fuck is supposed to be wrong with me?" she screeched.

And with that, she flew at him, raised her fists around the red aura that surrounded her, and he caught her by the biceps firmly, fingers digging into her arms almost painfully, but he allowed her to hit her fists against the pristine white fabric that now covered his chest.

She screamed, her voice only broken by her ugly sobs. "There's nothing _wrong _with me, you just don't _WANT _me!"

She heard him swallow, and it made the tears come harder, angry and hot and wet, streaming down her face, turning her voice into an ugly wail.

"You don't want me…"

"Usako…" he croaked, voice torn and breaking.

"You want HER!" she cried hysterically, fists pounding but it barely moved him.

"… what are you saying?" he whispered, shaking her. "Who do I want?"

She was getting weird. Her voice was weird. She was glowing weird. She knew all this. Something was wrong. But the tears were so hot and so angry, and all these emotions were so real, were everything she'd always felt, just so impossibly condensed and intense.

"Why didn't you visit me anymore after I woke up in the hospital?" she sobbed, clutching at him, yanking at him, desperate. "Why did you stop coming?"

His hands left her arms and grabbed her cheeks, tried to hold her up to face him but she tried to struggle away, averted her eyes and tried to free herself. "I didn't," he implored, almost wild himself. "I was there every night. I sat outside your door until the day they released you. I just didn't come in because I didn't know if you'd want me there."

She broke free, pushing him off of her. "LIES!" she screamed.

He stumbled back a step but didn't fall, and immediately came back towards her.

She couldn't see through her tears, she couldn't breathe through the sobs. "You don't want me," she wailed. "You didn't want me then, and you didn't want me last night. _WHY_, Mamo-chan? Why can't I be someone you'd _WANT_?"

He grabbed at her, shook her, shouted at her. Shouted words that rung in her ears but made no sense._ I DO WANT YOU _– He shouted them over and over, but she couldn't listen and she couldn't hear, like she was drowning in her own blood, rushing in her ears and flickering in the air around you.

"I'M SORRY," she cried instead, babbling and screaming and clutching. "I'm sorry I'm not some perfect princess or sophisticated like Rei, I'm sorry I don't–"

He was as panicked as her, she could feel it even when the red glow emanating from her steadily grew stronger, blinding.

With a yank Tuxedo Mask pulled her with him, his hand reaching out to rip something off the nearest tree. Only when he wrapped it tight and painful around her did she register what it was, and it hurt, it burned, and she yowled in pain and clawed her hands into the ritual ropes, the Oshide burning in cold blue flames where they touched her.

"TAKE IT OFF!" she shrieked, thrashing in pain, kicking and flailing into the air and against him but he had her in a stronghold, holding the ropes in place around her.

His lips and his tears were at her ear and they broke when he spoke. "Usako. I can't heal you. Only you can do that. You need to snap out of it. You need to transform and purify this thing in you. _Please–_"

With a violent explosion of red blasts, the ropes sprung off her and evaporated into fog, and Tuxedo Mask was flung away from her, tears and pleas and begs and all.

She clutched her chest, breathing hard, and he crawled back towards her, panic and determination and cold, naked, fear in his eyes.

But all behind that mask.

_Wrong_.

"Give him back," she whispered pitifully.

He frowned. He didn't understand, and so she snarled and shouted it instead. "Give him BACK," she screamed. Then flew at him, fists raised and ripping at the mask and the cape and the man.

"GIVE HIM _BACK–_"

He de-transformed. In a shimmer of vibrating air, the tuxedo disappeared and Mamoru was back, frightened eyes and blue yukata, and the red glowed a little dimmer and she collapsed into his arms, glowing and sobbing and afraid.

His arms flew around her, his lips in her hair even when her snot and tears and screams were sobbed into his collarbone, and his embrace was tighter and warmer than any she had ever known.

She clutched back even harder and cried, deep and pitiful and broken. "I o-only want to be w-wanted by y-you," she howled and hiccuped into his skin, clawing her fingernails into the soft cotton fabric. "It's all I e-ever wanted."

His arms grew tighter around her, shaking her, lifting her, willing her to hear. "Usako, I do want you!"

She heard. And she snarled. Lies. Lies!

She dug her fingernails into him and screamed.

"I DO!" he screamed back into her ear, holding her tight and even tighter. He was shaking himself.

"PROVE IT!" she screamed, face contorted with tears and he did the only thing he could.

He kissed her.

His lips were panicked, frantic, mauling her mouth as he grabbed her cheeks and whimpered against her and kissed her harder – until her hands stopped shaking and her lips started to respond, and her voice broke against his.

His touch only grew stronger and more insistent the more she started to respond, and his tongue stroked deep into her mouth along with a low, muffled groan from his throat even as he lifted her up, arms tight around her waist.

It was only when they passed that invisible threshold that she realized he'd carried her stumbling and tripping back into the salt circle. She shrieked briefly, ripping her lips from his and gasping in pain, flimmering up, but his mouth was back on hers immediately, silencing her, and with a satisfied, blissful groan she felt herself get pushed up against the statue with his lips against her throat, and something in her was screaming in blissful yearning that nothing felt ever as gratifying as knowing the statue was watching as she finally got what she'd always wanted.

She felt it receding, felt the veil of peace that overfell her, replaced with desire pooling deep and insistent in her core and her heart and between her legs, and when she lifted her hands to clutch at his hair and gasp against his temple, she could see her hand only barely glimmering anymore, no more than a red shimmer.

He saw it too, and it made him whimper in relief and kiss her harder, and he reached into her blue yukata and grasped her naked thighs. With a yank, he drew her legs out from under her and she wrapped them, jumping up, around him. Her yukata fell open, but she didn't care, because his tongue was back in her mouth and his hand had slipped into her cotton panties to grab her ass and his erection pushed against her sodden crotch.

"I want you, Usako," he whispered into her mouth, and she whimpered and ground herself against him, rubbing against his cock, arms locked around his shoulder. "I've never wanted anything but you, Usako."

She blinked against the tears that flooded her eyes, and as his lips slid to her cheeks, her temple, behind her ear, sucking and licking and biting and gasping, she gasped and blinked them up at the slowly purpling sky, and like fog lifting from her and out of her, she knew the ghost was leaving her.

"Again," Usagi ordered, and Mamoru pressed his swollen cock against her with a harsh thrust, pressing her against the jutting contours of the stone figures behind her, eliciting a tortured, labored gasp.

His hand at her cheek, her chin – yanking her face to his so she could see his eyes, his face so close his nose and lips were touching hers at the tips.

"I_ want you,_" he implored, eyes wet and insistent and hips jerking against her in emphasis. "I want _only you. _Only _ever _you._"_

She shook with want, with need, she needed more, she needed him to say these words and never stop, and she needed all of him.

Never breaking eye contact, she slipped her hands beneath his own yukata, into his briefs, and found his weeping cock to draw him out.

"I want you, too," she whispered back.

Breathlessly, he nodded. Slipped his own hand into her panties and whimpered when he found her soaked, and shifting her against the statue, he _finally _put the damn thing in.

He burst into tears when he did, his forehead dropping against her temple, and she clutched his hair and shuddered from her toes to the tips of her fingers.

With a glow of her skin, a flare up lifting from her body and dissolving into fog, her ghost was gone, Usagi could feel it clear as day. She was wanted now. She was free. She was at peace.

But Mamoru didn't even register it. Instead, he rolled his hips into her, slow and tender and oh so careful, crying into her shoulder. "I want you," he babbled. "I want you, I want you, I want you."

She hugged him, one hand in his hair the other around his shoulder, her head dropping into the crook of his neck and she kissed his shoulder and started crying, too, whimpering with every soft rock of his cock inside of her.

"I want you," he rasped. "I love you."

She whimpered, clawed into him even harder as he pushed her again and again into the statue of the lovers of Lake Yokai.

"I love you," he cried. "I love you so much."

Her own face was wet as she bent back to grasp his cheeks and kiss his forehead as he filled her oh so deep. "I love you, too," she whispered back, a smile finally back on her lips, and his answering sob spoke of purest relief.

* * *

They stayed for three more days. Mamoru extended their booking and skipped his classes and Usagi called the girls. They had a lot to talk about, a private onsen to thoroughly enjoy, and a few more ghosts to leave behind at that lake.

They didn't find Serenity and Endymion on this mission, either. But they finally found peace.

* * *

_Soooo, to put this in smutember tropes, I think I hit all the following lol: Sex on a mission, __unresolved sexual tension, Mistakingly Overheard Conversation, Only One Bed-ish?, Magical Healing Cock, Secret Mutual Pining, Youmas Made Them Do It (kinda)? Lol it was a lot, I guess?_

_Anyway wear condoms when having sex with new sexual partners ok lol? We can't all be healthy, fictional characters, yeah? (sex researcher mode off lol) Or wait, it's still on: Thank you guys so much for being interested in sex-positive written content that I and everyone else put out during smutember. And if you want to support more such content in the future, please consider letting the author of the stories you loved know (AND ME TOO LOL I STRIVE ON FEEDBACK AND WRITE LOTS OF FIC FOR IT xD.) So yeah, thank you for everyone who was along for the ride!_

_I thought this ghost story of mine was a nice bridge between smutember and spooky season, and I absolutely loved writing it, and I hope you loved reading it even half as much!_

_Reviews are love! Feed me more reviews lol!_


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